The Crossover Alliance Anthology - Call For Submissions

For many months now, I have been doing my best to build up a small community I call The Crossover Alliance. This community is formed of readers and writers who both create and appreciate reading edgy Christian speculative fiction - the genre that all of my fiction writing falls into. While a community is a very challenging thing to build from scratch - especially around a genre that has been built from scratch - sometimes you have to push a little harder to get things to the next level.

It was suggested to me a while ago that an anthology would be a great project to put together, seeing how our small community is full of writers who write in this marvelous genre, and putting out a call for submissions to such a project would help bring attention to our little corner of the world.

I am proud to say that we are now looking for submissions for the first Crossover Alliance Anthology, a collection of short written pieces that represent edgy Christian speculative fiction. All proceeds from the sales of The Crossover Alliance Anthology will be used toward maintenance and promotion of The Crossover Alliance community.

The Crossover Alliance Anthology will be published Summer 2014 in ebook (digital) format for various readers including Kindle, Nook, and the Sony Reader, and in paperback via Createspace. Entries will be accepted beginning Monday, January 27th, and the deadline for all entries is Saturday, March 15th, 2014. The tentative release date for the anthology will be Tuesday, June 24th.

Head here - http://thecrossoveralliance.com/anthology - for submission guidelines and some quick info on the group who will be reading and voting on what pieces get included in the anthology.

The End of Black Earth

For months now, I've been working on my current WIP (Work in Progress): Dark Horizons, the third novel in my Expired Reality series. My original intention was to release the first three books in the series in a row, one a month, this last summer. The first, Endangered Memories, has been released, with the second, Lost Birth, coming out of the gates hopefully next month.

Even though I'm about 75% through a rough draft of Dark Horizons, I can't shake the feeling that it's not the project I should be working on at the moment. Once my son was born at the end of August, my writing time vanished for a while. With weeks of no writing, I've had a creative build-up of sorts, and I have a HUGE desire to finish up the Black Earth series.

My original intention was to bounce between the Expired Reality series and the Black Earth series while alternating book releases within each series. As good as that idea seemed a while ago, it doesn't seem to be panning out too well now. I have fans who want to see what happens with Black Earth and for them to have to wait while I finish books in another series is kind of lame. Besides, my Expired Reality series is going to run almost a dozen novels, if not more, so I'd like to give that series 100% of my time and effort instead of bouncing between it and the Black Earth series.

All this said, I've decided to finish off the Black Earth series. My original intention was for the series to run about 4-5 novels and in keeping with that, I'm going to do two more books and close the series off.

Coincidentally, next month is National Novel Writing Month, or NanoWrimo. (Check out www.nanowrimo.org to see what it's all about.) Seeing how I have a lot of writing to do with two books, I'm going to use NanoWrimo to do so. I usually complete the 50,000 word limit early on in the month of November anyway, so I'm just going to do my best to complete two, 50,000 word manuscripts for the contest this year. Then I'll polish them up and hand them off to my editor after the new year.

Keep tabs on this blog to find out more about the next two Black Earth novels. I'll be posting plot ideas, writing samples, and some character profiles as I get into the thick of it.